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Olivia Garrison (no relation), a high school teacher at California’s Del Oro High School, has gone on record to the New York Times to confirm that she is facilitating the social transitioning of the children in her care, without the children’s parents’ approval or, indeed, even their knowledge.

Garrison, who identifies as non-binary and looks exactly like what you would expect, has stated that part of her remit as a teacher is to ‘protect kids […] sometimes from their own parents.’ In an unsurprising overreach, this entails encouraging students to engage in affectations of the opposite sex while in school, where their parents cannot monitor them, and deciding unilaterally that parents knowing about the social transitioning poses a threat to the children, and that they are in need of her protection, and that it is her burden to bear to be their rainbow spangled gender defender.

Garrison is a history teacher. Her job is to teach her students history, as prescribed by the school’s curriculum. In the event that a student has questions about their sexuality or sexual identity, schools have counsellors who would provide support. ‘History teacher’ is not a port of call on such a voyage.

State schools in the United States are becoming black box institutions. You can send your children into them, but you are kept in the dark about what is happening while they are there, and there is no guarantee that what comes out the other side is the child you remember.

The claim is that parents are not being informed in order to protect students, but really, I think parents are not being informed because the schools know parents will be appalled by what they would be told.

Groomer is, once again, the appropriate term.

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